Tag Archives: important news

In the old Soviet Union they used to joke that there was “no truth in the news and no news in the truth.” We haven’t quite sunk to that level of cynicism, but we are getting close. The news business is held in very low esteem–hovering near the bottom along with politicians, dinnertime telemarketers and timeshare salesmen.

Once upon a time social scientists believed that they could calculate the societal importance of an issue by how many column inches were devoted to it in the newspapers and weekly magazines. Maybe then, but not now. Forget the media conveyed by ink on dead trees, and consider our modern capacities to search the world for words and pictures, reports, analyses and sounds. Now consider what we get from our state of the art satellite fed reports from around this shrinking, beautiful, dangerous and complex world.

Right. Not much. We get important stories ignored, bloody stories obsessed over and lots of sound and fury, usually signifying nothing.

Take cable news (PLEASE!). Doing content analysis on MSNBC would have made social scientists infer that nothing was more important than Gov Chris Christie and his bridge scandal. Yes, a real story, to be sure, but an obsession? Then CNN found the Malaysia Air. Oh, I guess they didn’t find Malaysia Air–it’s still missing. They found the story. They reported breathlessly for weeks. They achieved some kind of Zen ideal by reporting absolutely nothing. They plumbed the shallows while trying to guess at the depth of the sea. They offered only speculation and the usual tragedy porn.

Wolf Blitzer, once a real newsman, looked like a hostage being made to read his captor’s manifesto. His soul was saved only by actual “Breaking News!” in our world of broken news: The Crisis in the Ukraine! For one brief shining moment we actually had CNN, MSNBC and Fox on the same story–covering with the same obsessive focus but with very different viewpoints. MSNBC told us how bad Putin was. CNN reported that Putin was bad but with extenuating circumstances. While Fox seemed to believe that Obama had invaded the Crimea and Putin was the more manly man.

With the world seemingly teetering on the edge of war, with Russia poised to sweep into Eastern Ukraine, there was some actual news in the news. Truth? Proportion? Context? Well, not so much. When Putin didn’t invade and the tide of the pro-Russian insurgents ebbed, there was palpable panic in the eyes of the cable newsies. MSNBC tried to resurrect Christie to little avail. CNN turned tentatively back towards the Indian Ocean. And Fox found some new reason to be outraged at either Obama’s weakness or power-mad dictatorial attitude or both.

Clearly they were all vamping waiting for something worthy of their technical abilities to reach across the globe and bring together people. Cable has to fill lots of time but paradoxically it isn’t well suited for depth–only breadth.

Then we got Donald Sterling, whose less than sterling character was revealed by his assistant and archivist. We got to look inside his soul, his business and his marriage. All ugly. We also got to feel superior to a stupid old bigot. A low bar indeed for feelings of superiority. Fortunately for all, Sterling was trumped by Adam Silver–the comish of the NBA.

Both Sterling and Silver (match made in Dickensian heaven) were adumbrated by the shooting tragedy in Santa Barbara. Cable got to wallow again in tragedy porn. First they interviewed kids, survivors and the parents and friends of the dead. They rapidly moved on to the shooter. They showed his picture and played tapes of him venting his anger at his cell phone camera. They interviewed shrinks and explored mental health issues trying to guess at a diagnosis–and “not wanting to speculate” but speculating that he was insane, or bored, or provoked by loneliness, bullying and an inability to find a date.

The story then went “meta” as they assembled yet more experts to analyze if it is a good idea to give the now dead shooter publicity by repeating his name, showing his picture and playing his manifesto.

We were all rescued from Santa Barbara by the sad saga of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. Did Obama break the law in trading 5 terrorists for one American? Bad law or bad deal? Discuss. Is Bergdahl a hero/victim or a deserter/traitor? Discuss. No actual facts required. Is Bergdahl’s dad, sporting a Taliban beard and living on Afghan time, a loving dad or a nutcase? Opine freely, remembering our faith that ignorance piled high enough transmutes to wisdom, the law of large numbers being immutable.

Are any of these stories intrinsically important? Maybe some. Maybe worth a glance or two. But they are examples of the news’ version of Gresham’s Law (Bad money drives out good money). Bad news stories, news stories that appeal to our prurient passions, drive out important stories. Benghazi took the focus off of the real scandal of the Veteran’s Administration. And all the other stories covered up the truly important breaking news of Europe turning towards the far right, xenophobia, anti EU sentiments and ethnic strife. Then again, you may have noticed that I covered all the trivia first, and therefore I also buried the lede.